


Diff'rent Strokes

by DianaSolaris



Category: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)
Genre: (listen: bethany using the term heterosexist is somehow unimaginably funny to me), (partially cause she'd be so damn proud of herself), Angst with a Happy Ending, Feminist Themes, Fluff and Humor, Found Family, Gen, High School, Light Angst, Martha and Spencer are Not Together, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 03:44:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16802986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DianaSolaris/pseuds/DianaSolaris
Summary: After the game, life goes on - as normal, at first. But university is looming, and Bethany doesn't want to admit that she's scared.





	Diff'rent Strokes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BookGirlFan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BookGirlFan/gifts).



For her birthday – barely a month before graduation - Martha Kaply had asked for another adventure. She’d been half joking, wistfully kind of hoping for something like a safari or a road trip.

Instead, she clung to the tree for dear life, willed herself not to look down, and said from between gritted teeth, “BETHANY I AM GOING TO KILL YOU.”

A blonde head poked around the tree, grinning down at Martha. “Come on! It’s nice up here. The view is _gorgeous._ ”

“Remember how I hate gym class?” she seethed. The bark was leaving indentations in her face.

“You can _dance-fight._ You can totally climb this tree.”

Martha groaned, perched her chin on the tree and glared up at Bethany. “In. The. Game. My legs are not that long in real life!”

“What’s taking so long?” came Fridge’s voice from farther above. “I want to take the zip line!”

“Fridge, be nice,” Bethany shot back, then shook her head. “They’re _racing_ each other. I told them they had to wait at the zip lines.”

Zip lines. Right.

Bethany offered a gloved hand, the other holding on to the line that kept her secured to the tree. Martha shook her head – she’d just feel that much more insecure.

“Okay,” she wheezed. “Okay, okay.”

“Hands on the ladder.”

Martha grabbed onto the rungs of the rope ladder and managed to hoist herself up another rung. And then she glanced at the carabiner she had to unpin.

“I’m going to die,” she said with a resigned finality. Then she unclipped it, reached up and clipped it to the next pin.

“That’s the spirit!”

“I _worry_ about you.”

\----

For the first while as friends, they’d mostly done their own thing, trying to remember what it was like to be normal. Fridge had written a makeup paper of his own and offered it to the principal, who’d been pleasantly surprised at the initiative and allowed him to – _provisionally –_ rejoin the football team.

(“He knows it’s yours because of the spelling mistakes,” Bethany had quipped, and ducked Fridge’s annoyed swat.)

Spencer taught Martha chess and Street Fighter. Martha taught him who bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Julia Serano were.

(He didn’t still quite get it, he admitted to Bethany, but he thought it was really cool that she read all this rebellious stuff. Bethany had started reading it, too, although she refused to tell Martha until she could at least get her head around what on earth intersectionality was.)

And Bethany?

Bethany had been entirely lost. She was happy – _blithely_ happy – to have her body back, complete with boobs, hair, and skin that she’d poured a lot of money into keeping clear. And she wasn’t _dumb._ But the feeling of having known things that were gone, the feeling of holes in her knowledge… she hated that. Everything was a question.

Fridge had finally cornered her after school, on a day where she’d resigned herself to wearing yoga pants and an oversized sweater. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks. I really appreciate that.”

“No, I mean –“ He’d fumbled a bit, then asked, “Do you keep feeling like you’re missing things? Like, you used to know all this stuff, and it’s gone?”

And her jaw had dropped. She didn’t cry in _front_ of him. She wasn’t that pathetic.

But the next time all four of them hung out, she’d invited them all onto a hiking tour of a nearby park. “Apparently,” she said with more than a little bit of pride, “they made some really cool paleontological finds there.”

“Paleo-what?”

Bethany wiggled her eyebrows. “ _Dinosaurs._ ”

\---

“I won that course,” wheezed Spencer. “I’m tiny and fast. I kicked your ass.”

“You screamed like a little baby on the zipline.”

“ _Shush,_ Martha! A win is a win!”

Bethany snorted, letting them run off in front of her towards the car. She enjoyed any opportunity to drag them out on something, and even though she’d been so nervous at the start, Martha looked like she’d enjoyed her birthday.

They were graduating in a month. They still hadn’t talked about.

Bethany’s phone chimed, and habit taking over, she pulled out to check it. Her steps slowed to a stop in the middle of the parking lot.

_Email from: University of Glasgow_

She’d look at it later. But on the drive home, she was quieter than usual. She hadn’t asked them where they’d applied, because that was _needy –_ that was being desperate. She’d be fine wherever she went. But Martha was going into social work. Spencer was learning computer science. Fridge was aiming for a football scholarship.

Everything was going to change.

\---

After that first trip, they’d slowly but surely drifted into different patterns. When Grade 12 came around, Bethany and Fridge took the same biology course. They started all gathering at Bethany’s house on Fridays, and Spencer’s on Wednesdays, and walking home together.

And the game – it had been traumatic and awful, sure. But it’d been funny, too. The first time that Bethany had made a simpering noise at Spencer and gone, “Oooh, Doctor _Bravestone,_ ” Martha had collapsed into helpless laughter, face turning red.

Bethany got a new boyfriend. He lasted two weeks before he started getting jealous about the football player she was always hanging out with – and she dumped him with incredulous laughter.

(“Seriously,” she said to Martha, “if I get asked one more time whether Fridge and I are dating, I’m going to stab somebody!”

“What’s wrong with dating me?” Fridge asked with a huff.

“Nothing! But it’s such a _heterosexist_ assumption,” she said without thinking, and Martha’s look of glee was so good that Bethany snapped a picture of it.

“Like how people never assume it’s _me_ and Fridge who are dating,” Spencer had added, and gotten a noogie for his troubles.)

\---

“Hey, Bethany…”

She’d already dropped off the others, and it was just her and Spencer in the car.

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

She paused at the stop sign, the fear rising in her chest, suddenly so much worse than usual. “Oh, don’t get all sappy on me, Dr. Bra-“

The name caught in her throat along with the thought – _nobody else will get it, ever –_ and suddenly she was crying, the terror suddenly too real to name.

She managed to pull over, and Spencer’s arms wrapped around her, holding her close. “I know. It’s okay. I’m scared too.” He pressed a kiss to her temple – when had she got so comfortable with this kind of platonic affection? – and stroked her hair, and even with part of her screaming at herself for the vulnerability, she was happy he was there.

\---

The emails for acceptances started coming in. Bethany hid hers, ashamed of both how many she was getting, and how far afield some of them were. The only one even in New England was Yale.

Then it was Friday, and the others were late. Bethany tried not to panic. Nothing was wrong (something was wrong) nothing was wrong nothing was wrong.

The doorbell rang. She opened it, and there they were – all of them holding college acceptance notices.

She began to cry again, and before she knew it, Martha was holding her hands, grinning. “I saw the Yale sticker on your last envelope. _Look!_ ”

Boston University. Social Work.

MIT. Computer Science.

MIT. Biology.

“Oh my god,” she exhaled, then – “Oh my god, you _fuckers!_ You didn’t _tell me!_ Fridge, you got into-“

“MIT! Hell yeah, _baby!_ ”

“What happened to football?”

“Zoology, bitch.”

“I’m getting you a T-shirt with that,” snarked Spencer. “I’m sure it’ll go over great at MIT.” Then – “Oh god, MIT. I was too excited to stress out.”

“Get your asses in here. I think this merits celebration.”

\---

Martha tried not to smirk too much as Bethany and Fridge stared in confusion at the books in front of them. “I know you’ve been really into feminist theory, but I’m not sure how this fits into it.”

Spencer covered up his snicker with a well-placed cough.

Martha steepled her fingers at the head of the table. “Ladies and gentlemen, pick your players. It’s time to enter a World of Darkness.”

Bethany peered at Martha over the player’s handbook. “…Is this revenge for the high ropes?”

“No comment. I hope you’re good at math.”

“So, yes.”

The best part of the entire scenario, thought Martha, wasn’t just that Spencer had _actually gotten_ Fridge that “Zoology, Bitch” shirt, or that Bethany’s scarf had at least three pins on it with ‘FIGHT COLONIALISM’ ‘FIGHT RACISM’ ‘FIGHT HOMOPHOBIA’ on them. And it wasn’t just that Spencer was taking campaign notes on a computer that he and Martha had built together out of scraps and cannibalized electronic leftovers.

It was that, even two years later, they were still together.


End file.
